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Clio Announces Financing, Document Assembly

I am here at LegalTech in New York where I had an opportunity to meet yesterday with Jack Newton and Rian Gauvreau, founders of Clio, the cloud-based practice management application. They had big news to share: Clio has raised $6 million in financing. This is the first major capital investment in any cloud-based practice management application, so it will be interesting to see where Clio goes from here.

Jack and Rian said the financing will be used to further enhance the Clio platform and add new functionality. Clio also plans to expand its marketing beyond the U.S. into other markets, including Europe, Canada and Australia.

The Series B financing was led by Acton Capital Partners, a Munich-based growth equity investor. Existing Clio investors, including Point Nine Capital, also participated in the round.

Document Assembly

Rian Gauvreau

In news of a more practical sort, Clio also announced that it now offers a document assembly function. I wrote just last week about the new document assembly feature in Rocket Matter, another cloud-based practice management platform. Now Clio customers can also upload templates for common documents and extract information from their matters and contacts to fill out the forms.

One difference with Clio’s functionality is that you can upload templates either from Microsoft Word or in PDF format. Rocket Matter requires the templates to be created in Word. This means that a WordPerfect user could create a template by typing the characters that create the merge field — Clio provides a guide for creating these fields — and then save the document as a PDF and upload it.

Now when Clio users go to their Documents tab, there is a new button, “Create.” From here, you can create a document using a previously uploaded template or start by uploading a new template.

4 Responses to “Clio Announces Financing, Document Assembly”

Clio like Rocket Matter aren’t the first to offer document assembly in a web based product, in the cloud or on Macs for that matter. The product that holds that title of first cloud based product to provide document assembly is in fact HoudiniEsq. You can perform document assembly task as well as bill for the time from within the HoudiniEsq interface and the MS-Word plugin. Both MS Word and PDF documents are supported. These features have been available to HoudiniEsq users since version 1.6, released over two years ago. HoudiniEsq 1.6 also has the ability to perform email assembly task and bill for the time as well.

HoudiniEsq 1.9 will be a game changer. I wish it was out of beta already so I could share but that day is just around the corner. What I can say is the new touch interface rocks!

Checkout HoudiniEsq. The only serious legal practice management app in the clouds.

The critical upgrade that I would like to see with CLIO is the opportunity for law firms to brand client email notices from CLIO and the website where client interact with CLIO with the law firm’s own brand. I don’t mind if the CLIO brand appears discreetly as well in a bottom corner, but I think its important for client confidence and lawfirm branding for the client to feel that the communications come from the firm and not CLIO.

Interesting to see the rapid uptake of cloud based applications for the legal profession. We are seeing demand for our online solution grow over the enterprise version, not based on price but on ease of adaption